in Australia, when we pay taxes, we get a receipt. The receipt shows what our taxes were spent on

I love that it helps you see how little of the welfare payments are going to the unemployed, since that’s the part that concerns people the most.

Always liked this because it helps people see to some extent where money is going.

I know the UK and Portugal do this as well. It was especially interesting in the UK during the Brexit years because you could see a tiny piece of that pie chart with EU contributions, almost saying "this is how little of our money is going to Europe", didn't do any good in the end but hey, still great info to have that all detailed

It must be so nice to see such a small bar for your defense spending.

I strongly believe that this should be the standard everywhere. Unfortunately most governments won't tell you this, because a few of them are busy building golden temples for their authoritarian leaders, and blowing half of it on cocaine while pretending it's the immigrants' faults

One thing to note about this breakdown is that it wasn't legislated with good intention but it was implemented in a very malicious compliance way that completely counteracted the original intention.

This receipt was legislated by the conservative party in Australia under Tony Abbott, the surface level intention was to "show where people's tax dollars are spent". However the underlying intention was to show welfare spending as a huge category that totally eclipsed all other spending in order to demonize welfare, particularly unemployment welfare. In order to build public support for rolling back that spending.

However when the letter was implemented, the welfare category was further broken down as you see here, completely working against the narrative that the government at the time was trying to spin (that unemployment welfare particularly was a huge drain on society).

In the US that would be a list of Congressmen and the Billionaires who own them.

Eww you guys are getting close to spending more on education than the military. Slippery slope.

This is pretty great. This should be happening everywhere.

That's slightly more than mildly interesting

I think something like this would make U.S. citizens feel better about taxes in general, since it can sometimes feel like you're throwing a large portion of your hard-earned money away.

The US doesn't give you a nice little letter, but you can go to https://usafacts.org/visualizations/the-big-picture/ to see something similar.

In America, our government organizations can't pass an audit

Cries in American 😥

USA:

Defense: |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| ||||||||
Boomer Welfare: |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| |||||||| ||||||||
Interest on Debt: |||||||| ||||||||
Everything Else: |

Where is the 1 trillion on defense? /s

Fun fact: in the United States you can request this same sort of receipt. It's slightly different, but all you have to do is request it, and they can show you exactly how many brown people they shot, or godless communists they've brought democracy to with your taxes!

It must be nice to live in a country where accountability is at least attempted. This shit would never work in Murica bc welll…. corruption.

W government. We need this level of transparency from all governments.

That is very interesting.

So what they do is take your tax and apportion it over by the Expense and Net Captial Investment Statement in Budget Paper 1 (usually Statement 6).

It's dead simple to do and really helps communicate where your money is going in general terms.

It was a Joe Hockey initiative.

This would be neat to see for the US

Health wouldn't be on there at all because fuck em

Defense would be spelled correctly and be so large that it would need to be on its own section, because the chart scale would distort things so badly that everything else would look like a sliver above zero

Education would be smaller than your immigration

Welfare, depending on the administration, would likely be some derogatory categorization for each group just to piss off their base

"other" would be the best biggest thing after Defense and provide no details, because it would be corporate subsidies and that would look bad

Kinda wish we got this in the US. Then people will realize all the junk our taxes support and will also (likely) want to cut spending.

Only in a perfect world

In the US we just all know that it's bombs to kill the enemies of whoever the companies are allowed to sell them to, and fighter jets that don't work.

Nice to see our debt is being reduced. Meanwhile, the US is struggling to figure out how not to let their economy implode.

In my country government spending is mystery for tax payers.

You can request this in most countries, especially here in Canada. It's cool that the Aussie government makes it more transparent and accessible though. The "other purposes" seems a bit sussy-baka, though.

I think this is a pretty good idea, actually. While this kind of information is available in most western places, people usually can't be bothered to look it up and then have very weird ideas about what their taxes are probably spent on. This would at least help clear some things up.

Mannnn... I wish we had this in the U.S. Unfortunately it would ruin a lot of the propaganda forced down our throats, disabling some talking points for our dumbass politicians.

They'd never give us something so comprehensive.

Tories in the UK did this and obfuscated to their agenda

They showed "pensions" but that was only public sector worker pensions then added the universal state pension to the "benefits" section to claim we had a bloated benefits budget for scroungers despite them being the party of triple lock pension (linked to greater of wages, inflation and aribitary 2%)

We get this in the UK too 👍.

Is this hard to do in practice? I would love to see a breakdown like this in the United States, and especially on a local level. What’s involved in getting this information? Where does someone even start to request something like this?

I'm surprised so much money is going towards disability, what kind of stuff do they get?

That is a freaking sweet seal for the Australian Government! Id wear that on a shirt

It's cocaine and prostitutes because it's always cocaine and prostitutes.

Mildly interesting.

I wish we had this in Canada.

I paid twice that in taxes here in the USA and I still don't have proper health insurance. If I got sick, I would be destitute.

Fuel and energy is also mining and has kickbacks.

You pay 20 000 $ of taxes????!

Other purposees are maybe funding for the esa (european space agency)

You pay more in taxes than I earn in a year.

Problem is in the US since so much of that is put into private sector hands we'd need to gather data on those costs outside of the taxes to put together a proper picture.

My local government (county and city) do this here in the US, it would be nice to see this on a state and federal level too though

I love that we have this

Transparency

That's the only good thing i guess. I heard that the law is against ppl and they can treat humans like cattle as long as its for your safety (lets set covid as an example). What a shitty place to live.

Based.